Did you see it? Have you seen the green flash? You know, that split-second moment when retreating Sun cannonballs into Sea delivering a cosmic wink, celestial eyelashes flapping emerald firework. How did you miss that? It was right there. Perhaps you looked too early. Gotta be careful, you’ll pan-fry your damn eyeballs and then you bet your bottom dollar no one’s ever seen ‘em a green flash through an eye patch.
No one sees a flash through an eye patch.
Aussie Byron ripping his new Ibanez
Sea Turtle Nest Excavator. Member of Agua Vale Mas Que Oro, organizing 70-mile Transpeninsula pedestrian protest with local activists against cataclysmic Canadian gold mining operations. March 21st. Hasta La Victoria, Siempre. Befriended two young Aussie travelers. Hours exploring trails and land. Cardon Catcus. Ocotillo. Torote. Palo de Arco. Picaya Dulce. Todos Santos Music Festival. Took Ben Gibbard, lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service, on 14 miles of Baja singletrack. Solid foot traveller. Sat with REM lead singer and artist Michael Stipes for a chat. Offering weekly trail running classes in town. Wednesdays, 3:30pm. Forget money, only trades/gifts accepted. Get creative. Helping conceptual design for “huerta” ecology center development near town. Giving yoga one last chance. Ukulele progress, one and two new songs. Apprenticing with neighbor to learn biodynamic gardening practices. Graduate applications in. And I wait.
Anxious. Excited. Confident. Ready. Free.
Photos accompanied by music and favorite quotes from Jay Griffith’s Wild: An Elemental Journey. Delicious book. Don’t die before reading this one.
Photo: Nic Heidbreder
“Nomadism is like an original fire in our wild minds; we stole it from the gods, and we made it our own, leaping to new places, quickening to motion, curious and light as flame. The keen urge has never left us to take a flinting tent and fling it under the stars, then swing on, on at dawn, on an elemental journey. That is how to burn most brightly. That is how to catch like wildfire.”
Currently in Todos Santos, Mexico. One month in. Simple living, daily love affairs with sea and mountain. Studying. Writing. Creating. Connecting with community. Contact! Contact!
Its evening, and the ocean floats red.
Corneas crawling through linen forts
Of blankets crimson.
Hermit peers West, emotional heat.
To honor the demise of Sacred Sky Fire;
Exoskeleton vibrations
Toast soft buttery soul beneath.
Gray and Humpback Grace,
Impossible journeys;
Still breaching, lunging, playing;
Old Faithfuls of the Sea,
Exhalations powerful, resonant.
Breath Deep. Breath Now.
Hatched Olive Ridley,
Mere minutes into life;
Time has come Brave One!
Enter Wave, Enter Mystery.
Welcome Life, now face Death.
Charge ho! Heave! Heave!
Follow current. Trust its tug.
Reds swallowed whole
By eclipsing twilight diamonds.
Nature, Grand Alchemist.
Turning East, to honor mountain jigsaw;
Barefoot sandy signatures,
Animal stamp collections
Of wandering Horse hoof, furtive Jackrabbit,
And callused feet.
Enter the deep end.
Melting into wondrous waves of Unknown.
Here now, accessible and available fully
To see what lives
Just beyond the breakers.
Pitaya Dulce – Organ Pipe Cactus
Olive Ridley Hatchling. Working with Local Sea Turtle Effort.
A last-minute opportunity to go to the “Valley Isle” of Maui for 8 days presented itself, so I bounded on it. Returned with some grand adventures in my pocket…
All of this complemented by wrapping my head around French philosopher Pierre Teillard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man. Complexification, the Omega Point, Cosmic Involution, the Noosphere. Whoa. Photos + Quotes.
A simple weekend of wilderness solitude on the Oregon Coast turns into couch-surfing with recovering heroin addicts, evading gunshots while chanterelle foraging and learning the true essence of Acceptance.
“Accept and you become whole,
Bend and you straighten,
Empty and you fill,
Decay and you renew,
Want and you acquire,
Fulfill and you become confused.
The sage accepts the World
As the World accepts Tao;
He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,
Does not justify himself, so is famed,
Does not boast, so is credited,
Does not glory, so excels,
Does not contend, so no one contends against him.
The saints said, ‘Accept and you become whole’,
Once whole, the World is as your home.”
- Tao Te Ching
Tent. Sleeping bag. Ripped canvas sack stressed with books and notepads. Fierce cup of burnt coffee wedged between dash and glass, a mug unwashed. Ukulele in trunk, severely out-of-tune. To the West! Where Sun dips into the depths and Shadow dances in delight to its homecoming. To the jurisdiction of Soul.
Urbanism weighs heavy. Head and heart drenched and unruly, like a surrendered raincoat sticking to skin like cellophane. Returning to Portland after 3 weeks in Southwestern Colorado and Utah wilderness left me deeply inspired but supremely rattled. So much gained. So much to make sense of still. So much work to do. Endless notebook scribbles, cryptic dreamtime hieroglyphs begging to be deciphered. What better place to venture than to yet another threshold, one of rugged, wild coastline?
This summer, I wrote an article for the Float Shoppe, a sensory-deprivation water therapy company in Portland. The friendly owners were interested in exploring the restorative qualities of epsom salt floats with endurance athletes. An excerpt below. Full article here.
“The door shuts behind me without even a slightest gasp, and I’m alone. Alone, except for this dark blue plastic bubble pod in front of me. The float tank. Stripped down to my birthday suit, I open the hatch and peer inside the mysterious container. Subtle scents of warm mineral water escape from the dark cocoon and introduce themselves to my nostrils. First foot in, I find it warm and slippery, likely from the heavy dose of salts. Now both feet in. An awkward swivel move to shut the door and I am greeted promptly by a fierce…absolute…darkness. Crouching, wading, maneuvering. I struggle for few minutes to let body and mind accept the totality of such sensory deprivation. And then it commences. The silence. The weightlessness. The suspension. The float.”
One of the most moving poems I’ve ever read. Touches me to the core. Images from the Animas Valley Institute’s 13-day Advanced Underworld Journey from which I recently returned in Colorado and Utah. Enjoy, and please, please, please slow down to ingest every bit of this.
What to Remember When Waking
By: David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
